posted in Technology
Australians will be able to switch off social media algorithms under planned legislation
www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cn9wyvxn95vo
Replying to @LadyButterfly@reddthat.com
How in the world do you “switch off algorithms”? Even sort by new or purely random content is still an algorithm. Not to mention, if you switch to something like sort by new, that’s even easier to manipulate. Just have bot accounts flood the feeds with whatever propaganda they want to push.
This is a good idea in spirit, but until I see the actual legislation, I feel like this could very easily end up in the category of geriatric politicians completely failing their attempts at legislating tech.
Replying to @jonathan7luke@lemmy.zip
This was what came to my mind as well, however Google does let you turn off your history for YouTube and when you do that (as I do) it just shows a blank page when you go there, so that’s one way it can be done.
Nobody does it because everybody likes to pretend they don’t like the crack until they have to go without. I do it on principle because YouTube has single-handedly changed a particular member of my family, one of the most innocuous people in the world, to someone who has loathsome opinions. I hate it a lot and don’t want that for myself. I am on no social media that serves up anything based on your previous clicking behavior.
Replying to @AgentSeven@lemmy.zip
On Youtube you can just click on subscriptions and it only shows content from channels you’re subscribed to. If you make some effort to curate the channels you’re subscribed to, there will be some pretty good content there.
To me, this should be the default page with the recommendation algorithm being an “explore” option to find some other channels to subscribe to.
The big problem with social media is you have millions of people competing with each other to grab attention. If the goal were instead to convince people to subscribe to their channel, people might actually put some effort into creating better content instead of trying to be the first to get out their hot take on whatever is going on. If they adjusted their interface to start up on the subscription feed, and have an explore feed which show maybe ten channels that have had a lot of subscriptions recently, it would probably solve a lot of problems with shit shit tier troll content dominating social media.
Replying to @AgentSeven@lemmy.zip
and when you do that (as I do) it just shows a blank page when you go there, so that’s one way it can be done.
I think it also only suggests videos based on the one you’re currently watching too, or maybe your current session.
I also mostly do it out of principle because I used YouTube a lot before watch history was even a thing, and I don’t care for the shitty front page suggestions it disables anyway.